Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
Tever pened eate Likely .. by man nd it
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d to see rs, have them put down’ as a joke,” Ian laughs. “Next thing, we were summoned and asked if we saw a series. We sat down then to write a TV series, having never written anything. I’m almost embarrassed because it was such a break.”
A decade later, Whatever Happened almost didn’t happen, either. For a start James, now 82, needed some persuasion. Ian recalls: “Dick and I came back from separate vacations and both said the same thing to each other: ‘I was wondering what happened to Bob and Terry.’
“And so I mentioned it to Rodney. He didn’t need any persuading, he was very excited, but Jimmy was a bit sceptical. We took him for a very, very long lunch in Chelsea.”
What finally convinced him? “About four bottles of Chianti and four sambucas,” Ian deadpans. Then the BBC had to be convinced.
Dick, now 80, and Ian went ahead and wrote 13 scripts, but even then there was a lacklustre response.
Ian recalls: “They were like Jimmy, they said, ‘Really? A sequel?’ We just kept writing, confident they’d change their minds, and they didn’t. It makes me shudder now.
“Then we explored taking it to Thames Television who said, ‘Yeah, we’ll do it’, and I think the BBC heard that and said, ‘Oh no no no, it’s ours’.”
The opening episode – Terry and Bob meeting again on a train after Terry has left the Army – is one of Ian’s favourite. “I did love Strangers on a Train, it really worked. They hadn’t seen each other for so long and it was a very funny situation on a train. That series was a real joy.”
Rodney always described the making of Likely Lads as “one big party”. Ian similarly remembers it in a glow of meals out and red wine. A bigger budget for Whatever Happened even allowed them to get out on location, on the Norfolk Broads. Ian says: “Rodney, Jimmy, Dick and I went into a pub and ordered a bottle of red wine.
“The publican poured four glasses and put the cork back into the bottle and said, ‘I’ll leave this on the shelf for the rest of the week for you’.
“I think maybe he had never poured a bottle of wine before. We had probably drunk two cases by the end of the week.”
There were trips to Newcastle, too. It was only in the sequel the audience was told the show was set there. A sign of times when plummyvoiced actors dominated TV, Ian explains they had kept it vague until then as so few actors could do a north-eastern accent in the 1960s.
James, from Sunderland, didn’t have a problem of course, but Rodney, a Yorkshire lad, struggled for a while. Though Ian says: “Rodney picked up inflections as the series went on. He loved Newcastle and going there.”
He says the sequel was such a success due to its nostalgia. “It’s about age and responding to being young, that first buzz, your first house, and suddenly you see your youth going.” But it was The Likely Lads (1964–66)
Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads? (1973–74)
Porridge (1974–77)
Auf Wiedersehen,
Pet (1983-2004)
The Commitments (film 1991, with Roddy Doyle) Lovejoy (1991-94) Tracey Ullman:
A Class Act (1992)
Still Crazy (film, 1998) Bob and Terry people loved. Ian says the camaraderie on set was real, and he is quick dismiss the story Rodney and James fell out in 1976 and never spoke again.
Paying tribute to Rodney this week, James himself dismissed the row. Ian says: “When you do a TV series you become this close-knit family, the rest of the world hardly exists. Then it finishes and you go your separate ways. But there was no animosity or nastiness.
“Jimmy got a lot of work in the theatre and cinema, he didn’t like walking down the street and people being like, ‘There’s Terry’. Rodney embraced it and loved being Bob. That’s all.”
It was Rodney’s lack of ego that Ian loved more than anything about his friend, who he last spoke to three weeks before his death.
He says: “He didn’t reap the rewards of a lot of great success, but he kept plugging away. It was so admirable, he was in it for the long haul.
“You get moments of stardom and then they go, but you remember you want to be an actor because you want to be an actor, not a TV star on the cover of Hello! magazine. He was a true trouper and never stopped loving what he did.”